2026
A posthumous year of Mailer reception. In June, several pieces in the press take up Mailer: an Economic Times op-ed on the 'fug' of The Naked and the Dead, a CrimeReads reconsideration of Tough Guys Don't Dance and its film, Taki's American Conservative memoir of his friendship with Mailer, Esquire's list of the 26 most American books with The Naked and the Dead among them, and a Critic essay on Mailer, Greer, and the sex wars. In September, Legs McNeil's memoir Resident Punk revives Mailer's late-1970s traffic with the downtown punk scene.
A posthumous year, tracked here through Mailer’s continuing presence in the press.
June — Mailer in the press
June 13 — Jug Suraiya, in The Economic Times, surveys the loosening of taboos on profanity and opens with the famous “fug” bowdlerization of The Naked and the Dead and the apocryphal Tallulah Bankhead exchange.
June 15 — Scott Adlerberg, at CrimeReads, publishes a reconsideration of Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1984) and Mailer’s 1987 film of it, reading the novel’s noir less through Hammett and Chandler than through Poe.
June 16 — Taki, in The American Conservative, recalls Mailer as a contrarian friend and the 2003 Provincetown interview he and Scott McConnell conducted for the magazine.
June 17 — Esquire names The Naked and the Dead one of “The 26 Most American Books of All Time,” in an entry by Kevin McDonnell.
June 21 — Felice Basbøll, in The Critic, revisits Mailer’s quarrel with 1970s feminism — The Prisoner of Sex and the 1971 Town Hall debate with Germaine Greer (Town Bloody Hall) — as a model of intellectual combat missing from today’s sex wars.
September — the resident punk
September 15 — Legs McNeil, co-founder of Punk and Mailer’s High Times interviewer (79.7), publishes the memoir Resident Punk (with Crispin Kott; BenBella). Entertainment Weekly picks up its account of an April 1980 party at Mailer’s Brooklyn Heights home at which Woody Allen spent the night hiding in the bathroom — the month The Executioner’s Song won the Pulitzer (1980).
Related pages
- 2025
- From Norman Mailer's 'Fug' to Trump's Oval Office | 50 Years Later, Reconsidering Norman Mailer's Wild, Bloody Provincetown Noir | The Dumb and Joyful Masses | The 26 Most American Books of All Time | Sex Wars, What Are They Good For?